It is simply further evidence that the costs of the nuclear “renaissance” are out of control. I mean what are they making these things out of? Platinum?

Imagine the scene. You step into your boss’s office to discuss the project you’re working on…

YOU (nervously): Good morning, sir. I was wondering if I could have a word with you about Project X.

YOUR BOSS (sternly): Ah yes, Project X. The one that’s 100% over budget and almost 100% over schedule. I hope it’s good news.

YOU: Er…

YOUR BOSS (fixing you with a deadly stare): Go on.

YOU (in a very quiet voice): The budget’s overrun by another 25%...

You can guess the rest. You’d be clearing your desk and finding yourself in the street before finishing your sentence.

With the nuclear industry, however, this is not only to be expected, it seems to neither surprise nor infuriate hardly anyone. Nuclear spokespersons give some weak excuses, promise lessons will be learned, and then skulk away until they have to make the same shaming announcement in a few months time.

Meanwhile, governments are blithely outdoing themselves in trying to give the nuclear industry billions in subsidies without the guts to call them subsidies.

If you had a child that showed this repeated inability to learn from mistakes you’d be extremely worried. But we’re letting these guys build nuclear reactors – one of the most dangerous technologies on the planet.

Meanwhile – right now – we’re losing the battle against climate change and nuclear power is a major roadblock to us all winning that fight.

Billions and billions are being spent on new nuclear reactors that will be online and producing electricity in 2012. No wait, make that 2014. Sorry, we meant 2016. How about 2018? 2020? If not then it’ll definitely be 2025. Okay?

No. It’s not ok.

While the energy companies are squandering unimaginable piles of cash and tinkering with experimental nuclear reactors that might be ready at some unspecified date, climate change is bulleting towards us like a runaway train.

The worst part about all this is that it doesn’t and shouldn’t have to be this way. We could be focussing on energy efficiency like there’s no tomorrow.

That’s two trillion euros saved – 2,000,000,000,000 – count those zeroes. That’s a planet-saving amount of money. Think of the clean technologies that money could buy. Think of the poverty and disease it could help to eradicate.

So how about it? It’s a lesson even those in the nuclear industry could learn.

“The last 24 hours have killed French nuclear finally because the cost makes it totally impossible to export and now you have one of the few partners actively withdrawing; it looks really bad,” says Per Lekander, an analyst for financial services giant UBS.

@Zamm_ I find this interesting what you are saying. You first say that we don't need suppliers liability in the nuclear sector because we can trust the regulators seeing everything. Then you describe how NISA and NRC have been sleeping on the job considering all the issues you list.
GE and Hitachi knew. NRC and NISA knew. The first did not care because there was no liability involved for them anyway - and that is exactly what they are playing now: There is nothing substantial coming from their side to relieve the suffering of the victims of Fukushima and they bluntly deny any responsibility.
The second did not dare to care, because of the pressure they were under from the side of big business (over politics) and TEPCO.
In India we see exactly what happens if you do require full supplier liability: the suppliers - Areva, Rosatom, but also Westinghouse - are screaming hell and doom and use all the pressure they can muster to force it out. Why? Because they know they cannot deliver a safe reactor - and they know that the more risk they reduce, the more they push themselves out of the market... and then they still face a risk that they are not willing to carry - or their financiers are not willing to carry.

The core of the problem is that the interests in nuclear power are diverse and very big - "safety first" is a hollow claim, profits, ambitions, commissions (or bribes), friends, jobs, they all scramble for priority. The current nuclear liability regimes (including the removal of supplier liability, but also capping, low insurance levels and/or reserve levels, and so on) make it only easier for these other interests to take prevalence. Up to the next Chernobyl, Fukushima... I see no reason for critiqueless trust in operators or regulators. No reason whatsoever. The only regulators I feel I can communicate with accept the critique and work on it. But especially they acknowledge they are not infallible. Most regulators arrogantly brush away critique and demand trust.

This whole knot of problems is not necessary, there are alternatives that deliver more, faster, cleaner and... in the end cheaper. Let's be honest.

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(Unregistered) Zamm_
says:

@JH. You forget to mention safety vs. economics is a trade-off of ALL technologies: you can therefore honestly compare cost only at the same level of ...

@JH. You forget to mention safety vs. economics is a trade-off of ALL technologies: you can therefore honestly compare cost only at the same level of safety. Why, for instance, is biomass allowed to be roughly 100x deadlier than nuclear power, under the current regulation regime (and why you're peddling this as "safe")?

The overwhelming scientific consensus and past experience clearly establish wind, hydro and nuclear to be quite safe (vs. solar and biomass). Problem: hydro is limited and wind is intermittent. Large dams for storage add considerable cost… and risk (their record is in fact much deadlier than nuclear).
Why aren't you able to publish your wild claims about nuclear risk in a reputable journal such as the Lancet (and cite a report by an "ethics commission" of priests, sociologists, political scientists, and the like instead, who came to their conclusions without any hard figures)?

Going a bit deeper, take a look at your "stress test report":
http://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/Global/eu-unit/reports-briefings/2012%20pubs/Pubs%202%20Apr-Jun/Critical%20Review%20of%20the%20EU%20Stress%20Test%20.pdf
I couldn't resist doing my own "stress test" on the authors:
Oda Becker's credentials aren't very convincing (to put it VERY mildly):
http://zettelsraum.blogspot.ch/2009/08/deutschland-im-oko-wurgegriff-18.html
I had even more fun with Antonia Wenish:
http://www.toni-wenisch.at/leben_en.php
"I was born in 1950 in Vienna. In secondary school I began painting, fascinated by Einsteins theory of relativity, Bob Dylan, the students movement of 1968 and colorful oil paints."
Wow! Still puzzled about your low credibility among people with a technical-scientific background? For example:
http://www.thereaction.net/events/y2011/nuclear_debate.aspx
Your "chief scientist" was there, and the vote was 63 to 7. Guess in which favor…
Yes, let's be honest!

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Jan Haverkamp - Greenpeace
says:

@Zamm_ We agree that economic trade-offs always play a role. I am still convinced, however, that it is easier to regulate safety and sustainability (in the Brundtland sense) while handling biomass, wind power, PV or geothermal sources than it is in the case of oil drilling (especially but not only in the Arctic), coal mining and firing or nuclear power. My expertise is in the last field and there we are faced with the claim that "safety always goes first", but the reality that economic and ideological trade-offs lead to incidents and accidents like Forsmark 1, Kozloduy 6, Jaslovske Bohunice A1, Greifswald 5, TMI, Chernobyl, Windscale, Mayak or Fukushima.

I urge you to really read the report of the German Ethics Commission on a Safe Energy Future - the discussion is about hard figures in their context. The Ethics Commission received its numerical input from all relevant advisory institutes at the disposal of the German government (most of them not exactly known for a critical view on nuclear power), and used that in the discourse we are trying to have here. You distort the picture of what the Commission was by omitting the participation of nuclear physicists and other natural scientists as well. The participating sociologist and political scientist are no less scientist than the involved natural scientists. The Commission was accepted (in its quality) by all in the Bundestag represented political parties. The Commission accepted your view on risk (the numerical one), they accepted my view on risk (a more qualitative one - there are certain magnitudes of catastrophe that are too large to be acceptable), but they still reached a consensus conclusion.

If Greenpeace has made any wild claims about nuclear risk, I challenge you to bring those forward. In my perception, Greenpeace has always been evidence based in its claims. That is true for the stress test analysis you refer to. That includes also, for instance, the the report we wrote on the health impacts of the Chernobyl catastrophe in 2006.
In case someone from staff or volunteers has one or another time made an outrageous remark, I am quite willing to do the bit of educational effort in correcting that.
It does not, however, change the general conclusion that we as an organisation have reached about nuclear power: nuclear power cannot deliver on its claims - including those concerning tackling climate change (it can do too little, too late, against a too high price), it has an unacceptable rest risk, it has an unsolvable waste problem and the ongoing proliferation as a result of civil nuclear power programmes presents us with unacceptable security risks.

Your judgement on the credentials of the authors of the Greenpeace stress test report are your own. Oda Becker and the late Toni Wenisch are widely acclaimed for the quality of their work, also in academic circles. The mudslinging tactic you use here reminds me of that in the world of climate sceptics.

Apart from our science unit at the University of Exeter, Greenpeace staff is of course rarely involved in academic publications. We are a campaigning organisation, not a scientific institute. But the reports we produce are based on peer-reviewed science.

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(Unregistered) Zamm_
says:

@JH. There are many things on which we disagree, but I'll concentrate on one: the "ethics" commission report:
http://www.bmbf.de/p...

@JH. There are many things on which we disagree, but I'll concentrate on one: the "ethics" commission report:
http://www.bmbf.de/pubRD/2011_05_30_abschlussbericht_ethikkommission_property_publicationFile.pdf

Page 11: "…the conviction disappears, that this couldn't occur in Germany". Strange: given what we know about the accident, we can predict that the consequences would have been very small indeed (3 additional safety layers)!

Page 14: "…the consequences cannot be spatially, temporally and socially limited": that's obviously navel-gazing baloney, if one compares with:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/index.html
(There are many ways to resolve this, among others NPPs: mortality divided by more than 10'000 according to Markandya & Wilkinson - far reaching consequences indeed, but in the opposite direction.)

Pages 14/15: "…practically all scientific studies conclude that renewable energies and better efficiency carry less health an environmental risk than nuclear energy.": given the reference EXTERNE / NEEDS studies, that's (currently, at least) an obvious lie for biomass and solar, and probably for wind if you include dam storage.

Don't you think that when you make such sweeping statements, the most basic scientific ethics would require you to cite your sources (of course peer-reviewed, in high-quality journals, or compendia of such work)? They are none to be found in this report! Where are they?!!

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Jan Haverkamp - Greenpeace
says:

@Zamm_ Let me first of all agree with you that I think that the German Ethics Commission has been parsimonious with its sourcing - Greenpeace would never get away with that... You could contact them yourself for a longer list of used literature.

The final version of the report in German was published on: www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/_Anlagen/2011/07/2011-07-28-abschlussbericht-ethikkommission.pdf

1. You are saying strange things. The report talks about the fact that in Germany the trust that an accident like in Fukushima could not happen in Germany has disappeared. That is a factual conclusion on the basis of sociological research. And I think that the German population is right in that judgement. We have seen sufficient incidents in the country over the last few decades to assume that reality is different than the blueprints. Plus the remaining risk of terrorist attack, sabotage or acts of war... Better than you, obviously, the German population in large seems to understand that even the most sophisticated NPP technology cannot protect completely 100% fool-proof in this case.

2. Bringing large scale centralised electricity to rural Asia, Africa and Latin America would require a huge and slow investment into grid structure. There are a lot better, faster and cleaner ways to reduce the impacts of low-efficiency wood-use for heating and cooking. Interestingly enough they circle around efficiency increase (high efficiency wood stoves build with local resources) and (for lighting and communication) the introduction of PV, small hydro, small wind and the establishment of small grids...

Interestingly enough you criticize the Commission on a plain description of the way you are thinking: the comparative risk assessment.

Note first of all that they talk about Germany, not about the Central African Republic or Laos. Secondly, they don't even refer to ExternE / NEEDS - and I would be surprised if that would have been an important source for them, given the drawbacks of that study.

The fact that you only know the ExternE / NEEDS study is your problem, not mine, nor that of the Ethics Commission. You can find a rather good overview from Benjamin Sovacool in Energy Policy from May 2008 (a peer reviewed journal): The costs of failure: A preliminary assessment of major energy accidents, 1907–2007. The Ethics Commission has used more German sources from among others the ÖkoInstitut, Wuppertal Institute, Frauenhofer and others that have done full life-time cycle comparisons.

Banging on low-efficiency (high poverty!) wood use to criticize renewable energy records is not serious.

I accept that you will not open your eyes for the devastation that Chernobyl and Fukushima have caused. You will unlikely want to imagine what a similar scenario (whatever the cause) would mean for power stations like Biblis, Doel, Hartlepool or Vandellos-during-tourist-season. Or am I wrong? I rather try to get to solutions for climate change - solutions that work and do not only cause heated debate - and solutions that reduce nuclear risks. The Energy [R]evolution Scenario offers a policy pathway that is worth taking into consideration in that respect. Pumping more and more money into increasingly expensive nuclear projects from which every few decades one goes horribly wrong does not seem to be a solution under any perspective.

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Jan Haverkamp - Greenpeace
says:

@Beppe - That is difficult to say, but it is likely that there would have been less reluctance to vent at the moment that not all people would have been evacuated yet and with that the pressure would have been kept under better control, plus potentially the hydrogen level could have been kept somewhat lower. Whether that would have prevented the hydrogen explosions is impossible to assess at this point. The fact that many countries do not have these filters in the vents leads to the nasty possibility that also they might face the same dilemma of venting or not venting when something goes badly wrong. It is very good that several nuclear regulators, like the Slovenian one, have understood this and now ordered the installation of filters. Will that make Krsko in Slovenia fool proof? Never. But it is a cost worth making.